“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... go with their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... proudly appropriated the description to themselves. The Homeric phrase ‘people-devouring king’ (demoboros basileus), applied by Achilles to Agamemnon and later used as a generic term for exploitative tyrants, was picked up by a Jacobin cartoon entitled The People, Devourer of Kings. It shows, in Ronald Paulson’s description, ‘the giant ...”

“... 1788. It is the kind of subject that would inspire a less devious civilisation-chronicler like James Michener to epic slabs of narrative and at least two thousand pages, sweeping us from the formation of the continental land mass to Paul Hogan’s amber nectar ads. But Keneally habitually sidles into his big subjects, illuminating them indirectly by odd ...”

“... secured, but hotly denied the claim that their favoured option – territorial compromise with King Hussein – had been overtaken by events. The Palestinians felt vindicated by Benvenisti’s figures on Israeli land expropriation, but didn’t want to be told that their own diplomatic intransigence facilitated the task of the expropriators. Fundamental to ...”

“... William Dickens and George Perry, that has stirred up the current controversy. Some years ago, James Tobin suggested that moderate inflation might ‘oil the wheels’ of an economy by facilitating adjustments in relative wages in different sectors (necessary to encourage people to shift jobs in response to changing technology and opportunities). Real ...”

“... golden opinions by executing what must have been a very delicate commission – a cover story on James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. So by the time that Chambers fired Bellow in 1945, he was himself in the very middle of his journey. He had led a shadowy life in which he dreaded two varieties of exposure. He had been badly frightened, both physically and ...”

“... container of the autobiographical narrative form. Aldiss, to simplify brutally, killed for the King in the jungle and now lives quietly in Oxford. How can such diverse phases of a life ever be brought into single focus? Joseph’s experiences in the East are recorded in a series of letters which his detective brother reads, vaguely intending to write a ...”

“... Analects, ‘it benefits all things and does not compete with them.’ Merlin turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams ...”

“... There is some evidence to suggest he contributed more than an initial to the ‘M’ figure in the James Bond books: hence Masters’s title. ‘M’, true enough, was the office sobriquet of Maxwell Knight, though not his only extra appellation. His work made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... style has carried across from the 18th century, and is conducive to the lethal truth. ‘King George may be said to have helped by maintaining a level of unpopularity conducive to uprisings.’ ‘His peculiar talent was simply to voice unchanging principles, a sort of indolence which often passes for integrity.’ Such sentences execute Swift’s ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”